Do tiger moms raise superior kids? The impact of parenting style on adolescent human capital formation in China

Haochen Zhang, Xuezheng Qin () and Jiantao Zhou

China Economic Review, 2020, vol. 63, issue C

Abstract: How parenting style influences human capital accumulation is an important yet under-researched topic in the economics literature. Based on the two-wave longitudinal dataset of Chinese Education Panel Survey (CEPS), this study explores the impact of parenting style on adolescents' human capital formation, including cognitive and non-cognitive skills in China. Following the mainstream approach in development psychology, the measurement of parenting style is constructed from two dimensions – demandingness and responsiveness, and further classified into four types: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful. We find that both demandingness and responsiveness of parents have positive effects on children's academic performance, while parents' responsiveness play a substantial role in the formation of children's cognitive skills (measured by the standardized cognitive skill tests) as well as socio-emotional skills (measured by mental health, self-confidence, motivation and extraversion). Putting together, the authoritative parenting style characterized by high demandingness and high responsiveness is associated with the best outcome measures among the four parenting types in cultivating children's human capital formation. Moreover, we find that student time-allocation, extracurricular activities and parent-teacher interactions may serve as important channels of the parenting influences, and that there exist moderate interactive effects between fathers' and mothers' influences and between the demandingness and responsiveness of parenting styles.

Keywords: Parenting style; Human capital; Cognitive skills; Socio-emotional skills (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J13 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:63:y:2020:i:c:s1043951x20301346

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2020.101537

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